Hullabaloo

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

 
Fiscal Responsibility I Can Believe In

by dday

I'm resisting the temptation to analyze every little story about what the incoming Obama Administration might or might not do once in office. I can probably find you 10 stories that would suggest progressive boldness (the Office of Urban Policy, going big on stimulus, negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan) and just as many that would suggest the polar opposite (Larry Summers, no material change in intelligence policy, general wariness to call the election a progressive mandate). All of them or none of them may be true; it depends on the unnamed source doing the leaking and how certain it is that they reflect Obama's thinking. I'm at pains to draw many conclusions from them.

However, the typical Village revisionism that warns incoming Democrats to dump the left or suffer the consequences does have me concerned. Clearly there is this emerging consensus that Obama simply must govern in a bipartisan fashion (I remember so clearly the same exact demands put on George W., don't you?) If the President-Elect were smart (and he is), he would use the concepts of this Pentagon advisory group to turn that argument upside-down.

A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department's current budget is "not sustainable," and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military's most prized weapons programs.

The briefings were prepared by the Defense Business Board, an internal management oversight body. It contends that the nation's recent financial crisis makes it imperative that the Pentagon and Congress slash some of the nation's most costly and troubled weapons to ensure they can finance the military's most pressing priorities.

Those include rebuilding ground forces battered by multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan and expanding the ranks to wage the war on terrorism.

"Business as usual is no longer an option," according to one of the internal briefings prepared in late October for the presidential transition, copies of which were provided to the Globe. "The current and future fiscal environments facing the department demand bold action."

This is pretty obvious. But Washington works on the shared fiction that military funding doesn't involve real money, but magic cash growing on a fantasy unicorn tree somewhere in Langley. Blue Dogs like to talk about fiscal discipline, but get funding from contributors and provide jobs for their constituents through these bloated contracts. There is a cottage industry funneling cash to these contractors, and they're exceedingly powerful.

However, despite the long odds this is a battle worth waging. Busting this fiction would remove a major institutional constraint to the progressive agenda - while the Pentagon just wants to use the money saved from outdated weapons systems to fund internal improvements and armed forces expansion, eventually the capital costs would fade and the weapons contracts wouldn't come back. And mind you, we're talking about massive, budget-busting sums, without much justification.

A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, assessed the Pentagon's 95 largest weapons programs and found that as of March 2008 they had collectively increased in cost by nearly $300 billion over initial estimates.

"None had proceeded through development while meeting the best-practice standards for mature technologies, stable design, and mature production processes all prerequisites for achieving planned cost and schedule outcomes," the GAO said in documents published last week to help guide the presidential transition.

It added: "Over the next five years, [the Defense Department] expects to invest more than $357 billion on major defense acquisition programs. Much of this investment will be used to address cost overruns rooted in poor planning, execution, and oversight."

All the branches of the military are in a similar situation. The Army plans to invest an estimated $160 billion in the coming years on a set of new combat vehicles collectively known as the Future Combat System. But their capabilities "are still early in development and have not yet been demonstrated," according to GAO.

$300 billion here, $300 billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money. Enough to finance a new energy grid or universal health care.

(Incidentally, skyrocketing health care costs are one of the military's biggest burdens - over half of their budget goes to personnel costs, including $60 billion for health care.)

This is obviously an area where the pull of lobbyists and the military-industrial complex would be extreme. Of course this is a Defense Department internal agency making the recommendation, so there are at least some allies to be rallied. Defense contractors have shops in practically every Congressional district in America, for just this reason, so they can characterize any reduction in their payments as a jobs issue.

But there are opportunities to convert these manufacturing jobs - into clean energy construction, building out broadband, creating a 21st-century energy grid to transmit alternative forms of energy, repairing and modernizing infrastructure. Those would be sustainable jobs based on creation rather than destruction. It happens to be more fiscally responsible than the current path, too.

Indeed, the Obama Administration has already signaled an end to replacement nuclear warheadsm (as part of a big picture strategy to rid the world of nuclear weapons) and missile defense:

The incoming administration, according to the paper, may retool the intelligence under secretary office established by Donald Rumsfeld; create a new high-level energy security post; and divide the substantial portfolio of the assistant secretary for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities.

It will also mull cuts to high-profile weapon systems, the paper states, naming three: national missile defense, the Airborne Laser and the Army's Future Combat Systems program.

Selling this to the Village as exactly the neo-Hooverist fiscal austerity they appear to be looking for, while going big in terms of a stimulus package. And putting all appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan on budget would mean that the Bush Dogs couldn't abandon their supposed fiscal principles in favor of "supporting the troops."

If there's one area where Obama should highlight a commitment to reining in spending it ought to be the military budget. It's dangerous, and the powerful forces who want the gravy train to continue would be gunning for him. But with a ground army of supporters willing to help, I think you might be able to sufficiently confuse the Village into thinking of this as a bipartisan, transpartisan, postpartisan kneecapping of the Left.

...I hope it doesn't seem like I'm buying into this Village tenet that all Democratic Administrations must only act in a bipartisan fashion. In fact, the polls show that they actually want full Democratic control of government so that the country can actually function. But that will erode if these Village means go unchecked, and a good way to deal with it is to subvert them.

.
dday 11/11/2008 03:30:00 PM |